CyanogenMod 9 Preview on the HP Touchpad

The HP Touchpad was a turning point. Everyone saw that there is a huge potential for inexpensive tablets that are simply “good enough” for daily tasks. So when the firesale happened, and the tablet was being sold for $99, a lot of people rushed to get it. Many of these people, while they knew they would be pretty satisfied with webOS, too, what they really wanted was to get the tablet so they can put Android 4.0 on it later on.

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Since Honeycomb wasn’t open-sourced and Android 2.3 didn’t look all that well on tablets, everyone was waiting patiently for Google to open source Android 4.0 and for the CyanogenMod team to start working on a port for the HP Touchpad. Fortunately, the CM team adopted the project, first by starting to work on an Android 2.3 port, just so they get to build all the drivers and fix the general bugs that would appear with an Android port on the Touchpad, and then by continuing the work on ICS and re-using some of the the code they wrote when porting Android 2.3.

The Android 4.0 port is not ready yet, nor fully stable, and video playback and camera are still not working, but they’ve filmed the preview for Android 4.0 fon the Touchpad. At first sight it seems a little strange to watch a tablet with a 4:3 ratio (like the iPad) in landscape mode, but fortunately Android can be easily resized for any resolution, so the OS scales well on the tablet. It should not be long now before a fully stable version is ready.